Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Alan Millard epitomized the rounded, 'holistic' scholar, bringing together expertise in Semitic languages, archaeology, biblical studies, and a deep desire to communicate the fruits of his research to as broad a public as possible, and never allowing himself to become a narrow specialist.Alan was born in Harrow, Middlesex on 1 December, 1937.Already as a schoolboy he became fascinated with British archaeology and ancient coins.As a member of the Merchant Taylors' School Archaeological Society, in 1952-5 he excavated The Manor of the More in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, a large medieval palace owned by Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII, publishing the results together with Martin Biddle and Lawrence Barfield in an impressively detailed archaeological report in The Archaeological Journal in 1959.His strong Christian faith and his father's friendship with the Assyriologist Donald J. Wiseman led him to biblical archaeology and eventually to Oxford, where he studied Semitic Languages at Magdalen College under Sir Godfrey Driver, graduating in 1959.After Oxford he travelled around the Middle East for a year on a scholarship, spending time in Iraq and Petra in Jordan (where he briefly assisted Crystal-M.Bennett in her first season of excavations at the Iron Age site of Umm al-Biyara in 1960).From 1961-3 he was Assistant Keeper in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum.While there, he published Aramaic inscriptions from Sir Max Mallowan's excavations at Nimrud, and, most famously, rediscovered tablets that formed part of the Babylonian story of the flood, the Atrahasis epic; these tablets had remained forgotten and unrecognised in a drawer for several decades.Atrahasis was the subject of his MPhil at SOAS under D.J. Wiseman in 1966, and in 1970, together with Wilfred G.
Source: Iraq
Author: Piotr Bienkowski
Institution: University of Manchester
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7124870945
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